Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

Professor Charlotte Gordon/Endicott College

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

(Random House, 2015)

By Lawrence Kessenich

If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, why the name of Mary Shelley, the wife of famous Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, is so often written Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Charlotte Gordon provides a full and fascinating answer. Although Mary Shelley never knew her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died ten days after her daughter’s birth, Shelley not only inherited her mother’s name but also her spirit. And, as Gordon makes us fully aware in this lively biography, what a spirit it was—in both of them!

Despite the fact that mother and daughter only lived together for ten days, Gordon presents their lives like a dramatic, intertwined novel, alternating chapters on each and continually leaving the reader to wonder what will happen next—and what new parallel will emerge in their lives. By presenting these two amazing women side-by-side, Gordon helps us to know both of them, and their times, better and to admire what they accomplished.

Wollstonecraft is best known for writing A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, a book that provided an eloquent, ringing defense of women’s rights at a time when most people wouldn’t even consider the subject. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call her book the opening volley of the Women’s Movement, and it was written nearly two centuries before general acceptance of women’s rights in Western nations! Spurred by the helplessness of her mother in the face of an abusive husband, Wollstonecraft saw the subjugation of women—and especially married women—with a clear eye and called it what it was: slavery. Although her arguments were dismissed by most men—and women—at the time, she had laid the groundwork for later writers and crusaders.

One woman who decidedly did not dismiss Wollstonecraft’s arguments was her daughter Mary. Her father, William Godwin, a philosopher and novelist who also challenged the status quo in his writing, revered Mary’s mother, engendering a deep respect for her in his daughter—until, that is, his daughter acted upon his and her mother’s words and challenged the status quo herself. At seventeen, Mary eloped with married poet Percy Shelley, and lived with him out of wedlock, inviting—and receiving—the approbation of polite society and her supposedly revolutionary father. Both Mary and her poet husband read and reread Mary Wollstonecraft’s work, and spent their life trying to live by her tenets of personal freedom that disregards societal norms.

But being an outlaw—Romantic or otherwise—carries a stiff price, and both Marys paid that price throughout their lives. Both were mocked and scorned, privately and in public, for living lives of sin. Mary Wollstonecraft had an illegitimate child by American businessman Charles Imlay and was impregnated by William Godwin before the two were married. (Not surprisingly, considering the contemporary belief that, outside of a few days after menstruation, frequent sex made pregnancy less likely!) Mary Shelley broke up Percy Shelley’s marriage and was also impregnated before she married Percy (after his ex-wife committed suicide). Because of this, and because they espoused “free love,” both Wollstonecraft and Shelley were called whores and snubbed in public.

Worst of all, despite the fact that both Wollstonecraft and Shelley were highly original, skilled, professional writers, their being free thinkers and women often prevented them from being taken seriously by most of the writing establishment and the public at the time. And those who wrote about, and falsely interpreted, Wollstonecraft’s and Shelley’s lives immediately after their deaths also ensured that both writers would be misunderstood for nearly two more centuries. As Gordon describes it:

Wollstonecraft was written off, first as a whore and then as a hysteric, an irrational female hardly worth reading—slander that proved so effective in undercutting the ideals of A Vindication of the Rights of Women that it persists today in the rhetoric of those who oppose feminist principles. Mary Shelley, on the other hand, would be condemned for compromising the revolutionary values of her genius husband and her pioneering mother [and]…she was discounted as intellectual lightweight, her only important work done with the help of her husband.

The irony is that these were both highly intelligent, learned women—mostly self-educated, of course—who were capable of holding their own with the learned men of their time. Wollstonecraft took on social and political philosophy, expounding original and thought-provoking ideas in those areas—which were often praised, until it was discovered that a woman was putting them forward. Shelley’s Frankenstein challenged the ruling ethos about the unassailable goodness of science and progress—an ethos very few men were brave enough to challenge, and no one thought a woman had the right to challenge. And her education was so wide that, later in life, she was able to write (anonymously) five volumes in a book series entitled Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men.

Perhaps the biggest irony of these great, independent lives, as Gordon describes them, is how much both Wollstonecraft and Shelley suffered over the men they loved most. Then again, perhaps it is not ironic, or even unusual. Don’t we still see strong, intelligent, independent women pining away for men who hardly seem to deserve them?

Wollstonecraft’s romantic nemesis was American businessman Gilbert Imlay, whom she met in Paris during the French Revolution. They seemed a perfect intellectual and romantic match, and spent blissful months together. But Imlay’s attentiveness to Wollstonecraft soon waned, and he used his business travels to get away from her. Wollstonecraft, who had become pregnant by Imlay, refused to accept that the relationship was not the ideal one she had envisioned.

These feelings were exacerbated when their child was born and Imlay did not care for the child as Wollstonecraft did. Long-lasting post-partum depression intensified Wollstonecraft’s suffering, and she pursued Imlay with a vengeance via letters and during infrequent face-to-face encounters. Ultimately, it took several years before she finally gave up on him and found her own equilibrium again.

Although Mary and Percy Shelley were artistic soul-mates until the tragic end of his life, he caused her a good deal of suffering during their years together—and, as Gordon fairly represents it, Mary could be hard on him, too. Shelley could be the very embodiment of  many people’s image of the Romantic poet: dreamy, impractical, self-involved, putting art above everything else. Unfortunately, these attitudes usually left Mary, who was trying to write herself, to deal with the everyday responsibilities of running a household: planning meals, caring for children, shopping, paying bills, and so on. (Her mother had similar problems with Mary’s father, Godwin, who wanted little involvement with domestic duties.) Of course, as a wife of her time, Mary was expected to do these things. But Mary was not a typical wife of her time, she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, and she came to resent Percy’s comparative freedom.

To make matters worse, Percy often had crushes on younger women—as he’d had on Mary when she was seventeen and he was twenty-two. These younger women were often part of social groups with whom the Shelleys spent a good deal of time, so Percy’s flirtations were in full view of Mary. Although Mary espoused free love, in the event it was often difficult to see herself displaced in Percy’s attentions.

Percy always came back to Mary, however, even if she sometimes made it difficult by being cold and distant. He seems to have loved her to the end, as she did him, even if they were not as close as they’d once been. And they never ceased sharing their literary efforts, each going to the other for advice and support until the very end.

But with all the sturm und drang that sometimes characterized their love life, these two women produced an impressive array of fiction and nonfiction works. To give just two examples from the output of each: Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women has a fresh, personal voice that makes its world-changing arguments clearly and simply, unlike most contemporary philosophical writers, which is why it still speaks to us today. Her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark seems to have introduced a whole new style of essay writing, full of personal and passionate responses to people and places. Gordon doesn't make this comparison, but this style sounds to me like a pre-cursor to the New Journalism of the 1960s.

As for Shelley, her Frankenstein was a bold and wholly original work of philosophical fiction whose theme is as challenging today as it was when she wrote it. Her “monster” has become an icon of Western civilization, and with the advent of the atomic bomb, her cautionary tale about the hubris of science was instantly proved prescient. Her voluminous, erudite contributions to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men demonstrates the depth and breadth of her knowledge as well as her writing skill. As one source describes her contribution to this series:

Shelley's biographies reveal her as a professional woman of letters… Her extensive knowledge of history and languages, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography are reflected in these works.

These two bold women led interesting, complex, difficult, colorful lives, and Gordon presents them to us with all of their complexity and contradictions. She makes us appreciate how important it is that the reputations of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley have been rehabilitated over the past few decades. And Gordon’s well-thought-out dual biography will certainly continue to advance those reputations. She sums up the importance of these two women at the close of the book:

Without knowing the history of the era, the difficulties Wollstonecraft and Shelley faced are largely invisible, their bravery incomprehensible. Both women were what Wollstonecraft termed “outlaws.” Not only did they write world-changing books, they broke from the strictures that governed women’s conduct, not once but time and again, profoundly challenging the moral code of the day. Their refusal to bow down, to subside and surrender, to be quiet and subservient, to apologize and hide, makes their lives as memorable as the words they left behind. They asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end.




                                                        ABOUT THE REVIEWER

                                     
During his time at Houghton Mifflin, Lawrence Kessenich recruited W. P. Kinsella author of “Shoeless Joe,” Rick Boyer’s “Billingsgate Shoal”, a mystery that won an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, “Confessions of Taoist on Wall Street,”by David Payne, and “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton,” edited by Diane Middlebrook. Kessenich was the editor for Terry McMillan’s first book “Mama,” as well. Kessenich is an accomplished playwright, poet, and a managing editor for the literary journal: Ibbetson Street.

The Chintz Age by Ed Hamilton: tales of love and loss for a new new york

I have had the pleasure to interview Ed Hamilton, the author of "The Legends of the Chelsea Hotel," a number of times and he had fascinating stories about the titled hotel, that  he still lives in with his wife Deborah. The Chelsea is gutted, and will eventually be a boutique hotel, with some superficial bohemian touchings. But this grand building in the Chelsea section of New York City, once housed famed artists, musicians, and writers like Thomas Wolfe, Sid Viscous, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith, as well as the obscure, eccentric and insane.

It was a place where one could a get a reasonably priced room and live the life of an artist. This has all but vanished as big developers and moneyed interests have taken over the city. A few years back Ed said he was working on a novella, and short story collection, that took on the clash of cultures of the old and new. His characters, struggling artists and writers, are forced to confront their own obsolescence in the face of this surge of capitalist expansion. I told Ed to send his manuscript to Gloria Mindock of the Cervena Barva Press, and now the book " The Chintz Age" will be out this fall. Here is an excerpt:

The Chintz Age

Traditional fare wasn’t Martha’s specialty, and in fact she had never cooked a turkey before, but she figured, how hard could it be?  She wanted to do something special for her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, who were coming into the city from Connecticut today to take over her apartment, and, Martha wanted to believe, to take up the torch of Bohemianism in the East Village—even if Taylor was studying fashion and Brock, well, he had apparently landed a high-paying job with a company called Google or something ridiculous like that.  A fat, black-and-white tom cat curled in and out of Martha’s legs as she prepared the stuffing at her kitchen counter, mewing until she flung  him a scrap.

    This was going to be the last dinner Martha would ever cook in the old loft on Avenue A—appropriately, a Thanksgiving dinner.  Or maybe not so appropriately, since what, after all, did she have to be thankful about?  Thankful for having been part of an ongoing tradition of struggle and resistance?  Sure.  Thankful for her artistic achievements?  Of course.  But that was all in the past; the present reality was that she was worn out and used up, being replaced, forced to give up the apartment—including her beloved kitchen with its glass-fronted art deco cabinets and its ancient, temperamental gas stove—and the life she loved.  True enough, this was simply the inevitable changing of the guard, the old for the new, and not to be mourned but rather celebrated; though just as inevitable, perhaps, were Martha’s own bittersweet feelings of nostalgia and regret.  The cat—predictably enough—turned up his nose up at the giblet and wandered off into the living room.
Martha Weatherly was a photographer and artist who had lived in New York for almost three decades.  She had built a career by photographing and painting the fabulous and eccentric denizens of the East Village demimonde—with a few random hookers and drag queens thrown in for good measure.  In the end, Martha’s money had run out.  By this point she hadn’t had a show in nearly six years, a situation directly connected with her age, she was the first to acknowledge, the better part of her success having come when she was a young, attractive, sexually uninhibited woman.  Lately she had been reduced to relying on “loans” to pay the rent, a thinly veiled form of charity, as she knew that, in all likelihood, she would never be able to repay most of them.  Her ex-husband Ronald Billings, her daughter’s father, was her biggest creditor, and he was now demanding a bit of payback—not that she could blame him.  The deal was, she was giving up her super-cheap apartment, which under the rent stabilization laws could go to a family member, and moving to Connecticut to take care of her eighty-seven-year-old, bedridden and incontinent ex-mother-in-law.

    It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.  Martha would receive a salary, room and board, and basically the run of the mother-in-law’s small house.  She even liked the old woman.  It was the loss of the apartment that hurt, though finally, what choice did she have?  She had burned a lot a bridges—oh, boy, had she.  When you’re a strong person, as she had had to be to succeed, when you put yourself out there and say, this is who I am, take it or leave it, there’s always going to be people who don’t like it, there’s always going to be people who hate you.  And so the chickens had come home to roost, as she had known all along they eventually would.\

Earlier that morning, Martha had been throwing out junk she had accumulated over the past thirty years, tidying up, discarding anything that she didn’t think Taylor and Brock would want or need.  Quite a pile had accumulated at the curb, and, taking a break from her dinner preparations, Martha chanced to look through the window to see a scruffy man, most likely homeless, scrounging through the books and record albums, the old clothes, the dishes, and the knick-knacks that had so recently been hers.  At first she didn’t give it a second thought—she was glad to see that someone might have a use for her things—but looking a bit closer, at the balding head with its scraggly halo of unkempt hair, the unshaven face, the thin, compact body, she decided that the man reminded her of someone she knew, or, rather, had once known, many years before.  Despite the cold, the man was not warmly dressed, wearing only an oil-stained khaki raincoat as his outer layer, leading Martha to think at once of a warm down coat, a man’s coat, that had been hanging in the back of her closet for quite some time.  It would probably be too big for him, but it was a far sight better than the threadbare rag of the raincoat.  Maybe he could use a couple of blankets as well, Martha thought as she scanned the sad, nearly bare closet, deciding on a whim to throw in a knit hat and scarf that she had never particularly liked.

Fresh out of art school, Martha had moved to New York in the early eighties, on the invitation of an older friend.  Though Martha had at first been worried about what she was going to do for rent money, it turned out that the friend lived in a squat on East Second Street.  Martha had always been good with her hands and wasn’t afraid to get them dirty, so she fit in perfectly with the other do-it-yourself homesteaders and anarchists.  She worked several hours a day fixing the place up and had plenty of time between the scattered odd jobs she took for spending money to devote herself to painting and photography.  And while she considered herself primarily a painter, it was through her photographs that Martha first attracted the attention of the art world.  Her photos of the squat—the make-shift construction, the stained mattresses and broken-down chairs, the water jugs and piss buckets, the jerry-rigged power lines patched into lamp posts, the young, charmingly scruffy, tattooed ragamuffins, their clothes piled on in layers against the cold; and then the scowling police with their helmets and riot batons, the roadblock, the teargas, the bottle throwing, the beatings; finally the mounds of rubble at the curb, the hash of clothes and belongings being shoveled into a truck mere yards from the huddled forms of the newly homeless—these images had made Martha’s reputation, had established her career and brought her fame, her work having been featured in magazines, newspapers, and galleries worldwide.  Martha’s own involvement in the scene, and her vocal commitment to its ideals, had seemed to transfer an immediacy and a poignancy directly to the images themselves.  Ever conscious of her own image, she had even had the presence of mind to have one of her comrades snap a shot of her sitting dazedly on the curb, bleeding from a gash to her scalp.  The cops had tried to take her camera, but she had doggedly held onto it.

It was at the squat that Martha had met Howard Coots, the young man whose memory the old homeless man had conjured.  Little Howard: never quite handsome, but cute in his own dark way, elflike, a kind of trickster, quick-witted and sarcastic.  She had almost had an affair with Howard—the attraction, she believed, had been mutual—and it probably would have happened if her future husband hadn’t also been living in the squat.  More her type, Ronald was a large, bearish man, more obviously able to protect her, certainly in the physical, though also in the financial sense, as Ronald was of a decidedly practical bent.  Still, Martha had been drawn to Howard’s manic energy, his vitality, and his passion for what he believed in.  Howard had been one of the more active members of the squat—politically, that is.  Truth be told, despite his considerable enthusiasm for organizing protests and the like, Martha remembered him as being a bit on the lazy side when it came to physical labor.  But that was secondary.  Howard had been an artist, and, like her, devoted to his craft.  There were plenty of devoted people in New York then, people with the courage of their convictions, people who wouldn’t compromise their artistic visions (though there were a damn lot of the other kind too, ready to sell out when the price was right).  That was the Golden Age, the eighties, when the art world and the social scene of the East Village and Soho were really cooking.

Traffic was light coming into the city that afternoon, the streets of Harlem quiet for the holiday and relatively deserted, dotted only here and there with a scattering of casually dressed people, some carrying covered dishes on their way to dinner, others socializing in front of the few stores that were open.  “Now tell me exactly what we’re doing today?” Taylor said.

Taking his eyes from the road, Brock glanced at her briefly.  “You know as well as I do that we’re going to the East Village to eat Thanksgiving dinner with your mother.”
Brock was driving Taylor’s father’s brand new midnight-blue Lexus—an indication of Ronald’s trust in the young man.  The young couple was moving to the city.  They had new jobs; they were starting their new life together.

Taylor couldn’t sit still.  She squirmed in her seat.  She smoothed her blond hair.  Taylor was tall, unlike her mother (she got it from her father), very thin, model-thin, a bundle of nervous energy.  This unease, this unsettled disposition, this, for what it was worth, was what she had inherited from her mother.

Traffic picked up a bit toward Midtown, with all the busses going in and out of the Port Authority, with the sidewalks clogged with tourists from Europe and Japan who didn’t give a hoot about Thanksgiving, and with excited families flocking to the Macy’s parade.  Brock and Taylor were stopped at a light behind a double-decker tour bus.  “It’s all so ridiculous!” she blurted out.
Brock was thin like his girlfriend, the same height as Taylor, and so not short, though not exactly tall for a man, his dark hair fashionably mussed.  “She says she’s a good cook.  She wants to do something for us.”  Brock hadn’t heard this from Taylor’s mother, and only knew it second hand, from Ronald.  In fact, he had met Martha only once before, which made him nervous as well, though he kept his own unease in check.  He was the one who had to keep it together.

“For us.  I see.  That explains it, then, since she’s never done anything for me.  And as for being a cook, well, that kind of goes along with motherhood, in my mind at least.”  Brock didn’t understand, she thought.  He had grown up with both his parents.  Well, almost: they had only divorced recently, while he was in college.

“At least she’s trying, so maybe give her a break.  She’s giving us a fucking great  apartment.”
“For money.”

“Yeah, for money.  But it can’t be easy getting old like that and suddenly finding yourself poor.”

    “Oh, I’m so tired of everyone making excuses for that woman!  First my father and now you.”  She threw up her hands in exasperation.  “I feel like screaming!”

Brock know better than to say anything more.  Heading down Second Avenue, the cars became sparse again.  They drove through the last vestiges of the old Jewish neighborhood, past the ornate façade of a former Yiddish theatre, past a couple of kosher bakeries conspicuous amidst the trendy bars and restaurants that were springing up.  A few of the bars were opening for business and only just now hosing down their sidewalks.

“Well, at least you didn’t say it was because she was an artist,” Taylor said.  “The great artist.  If I hear that one more time I think I’ll vomit.”

Taylor couldn’t remember her mother ever living with the family, though in fact Martha had lived with her husband and daughter in their apartment on the Upper West Side for three years before moving to her present location in the East Village.  Growing up, Ronald had told her: “Your mother loves you, she’s just very focused on her career and sometimes she doesn’t see what’s important.”  She’d had to make some difficult choices, Ronald had given his daughter to understand, and sometimes maybe she couldn’t help hurting people.  “I know she regrets not really being a mother to you,” he had told her, “but she’s basically a good person.”  Recently, however, Taylor had begun to doubt her father’s sincerity in this regard.  Martha had been turning up with increasing frequency lately, usually to take out a loan, and Ronald had been unable to hide his satisfaction at this turn of events.  Taylor intuited that this was in some sense her father’s revenge, believing that he got a kick out of this sort of demonstration that his ex-wife still needed him, even after all these years.  To some extent, Taylor shared in his satisfaction.  On the other hand, Ronald had done his work all too well, and Taylor had long since fallen under the spell of her mother’s self-aggrandizing mythology.  Taylor admired her mother for her talent and determination.  She had long wanted to impress the older woman, and perhaps even to emulate her in some way.  Taylor was in awe of her mother.
Getting no response from her boyfriend, Taylor continued: “I’ve only seen the woman a handful of times in my life, mainly on holidays.  She always shows up with crappy gifts like art books and sketch pads and paint sets, when she knows I’m not interested in that shit.  And always snapping photos!  Not like normal snapshots, but obsessively, whole rolls of film, trying to get you when you’re not looking, when you least expect it.  At least I’ve never shown up in any of her shows, I can thank my lucky stars for that!”

Brock sighed.  “It’ll go quickly enough.”

“Oh, she’ll keep us entertained, don’t worry!  She’s always up to something, and she probably won’t even notice us.  Whatever she has planned, it’s about her, not us.  She’s supremely self centered.  That’s one thing I learned about her very early on.  I seriously don’t even believe she knows that other people exist.”

As Brock backed the car into a parking space, his rear wheel crunching over the edge of a plastic garbage bag that had tumbled from a heap tossed carelessly to the curb, he said, jokingly, “You know, I don’t even like turkey.”

“You think I do!?” Taylor replied, indignant.



When she got down to the street, Martha saw that the homeless man was really messing things up, dumping out the boxes and pulling open the bags that she had stacked so neatly at the curb, strewing clothes and dishes and knick-knacks carelessly about over the sidewalk, so she couldn’t help it that her first inclination was one of irritation.  But then when she saw it was Howard, for it was indeed her old friend from the squat, her irritation dropped away—she was so happy to see him!—though on another level it called to mind the sort of irritation she had felt for this man long ago.  For he had always been like this, irresponsible, leaving it to someone else to clean up his mess.  “I thought you might be able to use these,” Martha said as she approached him, handing over the folded winter clothes and blankets, and as she did so she wondered what had driven her down the stairs and onto the cold street.  Some vague longing: desire, loneliness, nostalgia, guilt, a deep regret, perhaps a darker motive.  The sidewalk was scrubbed-up now like the rest of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood—even if, to the anointed, the very air still retained a tang of the prickly menace of bygone years, together with a delicious whiff of the old glorious freedom.

Beneath a bald head framed by wisps of thinning black hair, Howard’s face was wrinkled and weathered, stretched tight to his cheekbones, his skin yellowed, the color of nicotine—a junkie’s look, as in fact he numbered heroin among his demons.  The slight hunch of his narrow back, scarcely noticeable in his youth, was now more pronounced, and the way he favored one leg as he straightened up betrayed the limp he had picked up along the line of his hard life’s journey.  Though Martha couldn’t help congratulating herself on her own well-preserved state, her good health and comparative good looks, she sensed something honest in Howard’s decay.  While she had long suspected that she had bought her pride and her sense of self at the expense of her authenticity and integrity, she could tell at a glance that Howard hadn’t flinched from the full fire of life, the full consequences of his youthful idealism.  But then, what had he been in the old days?  A comic book artist—a poor one, in her opinion—with a militant political bent.  Maybe it was easier not to sell out when nobody was buying.

“Thanks, I sure can,” Howard said, taking the blankets.  Then, a little embarrassed, a little nervous, glancing back down, he said, “Is this your stuff?  There’s some good albums here: The Buzzcocks, X, Joy Division, Gang of Four.  These kids, they’re all into vinyl now.  I can sell these for top dollar.  You sure you want to give them away?”

When Howard spoke, she saw he was missing a few teeth. “I haven’t played them for years,” she said.  “Time to let them go.”

    Martha knew she had betrayed her annoyance, because Howard glanced around on the sidewalk as he said, “Oh, sorry.  Am I making a mess?”  He picked up several items and put them in a box, and stuffed a wad of papers and sketch pads back into a ripped-open bag.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

It was true that Howard hadn’t recognized Martha at first; he had thought she was just another kindly old lady, a do-gooder, a busybody.  Now, looking closer, he saw through to the girl who had been there before, trapped inside the sagging skin and the chunky, thickset body.  To Howard, drawing on his memories, Martha still looked young and attractive.  Her face had retained a fullness, a relative lack of wrinkles, and there was a healthy blush to her skin.  She must have had an easy life, he decided.  Howard knew that Martha was a famous artist (what he should have been) and that made him feel inferior.  Accordingly, he drew himself up more erect, tried to summon up his old self, adopted what he remembered of his old swagger, pulled on the mask of his old boyish charm.
Martha witnessed the transformation.  Her instinct was to scold this irresponsible boy-man, to lecture him—for his own good, of course—though for what, she wasn’t quite sure.  For messing up the sidewalk?  He was continuing to pick up, albeit halfheartedly.  For wasting his life?  A bit late for that, though perhaps it would have to do.  “So what have you been up to lately?” she began, testing the waters.

“Oh, I’m still doing my drawing.  I haven’t been as lucky as you, of course.”  Martha winced at that word, and Howard quickly added,  “Not as successful, I mean.”

“Where can I see some of your work?”  Martha understood, but she pressed him, maybe to emphasize the difference between them as artists—or rather, herself as an artist, and he as, well, a poseur, a nobody.

Howard hemmed and hawed.  “Ah, well, let me see,” he said, shifting nervously foot to foot, before summoning up a few underground publications that had come out in the eighties and nineties, nothing that Martha had heard of, or remembered hearing of anyway—underground comics and anarchist zines.  “It’s non-commercial art,” he said, implying, Martha thought, that her art was commercial.  “I’ve always been about that,” Howard said, self-importantly.  “You know, the money’s not important.”

“Where are you living these days?”

Another sore spot.  This was really turning into an interrogation.  Howard remembered what he didn’t like about Martha, basically that she could be overbearing, bossy, a bitch.  He also remembered one of the chief attractions of his minimalist lifestyle: not having to listen to this kind of shit.  Still, he desperately wanted her approval.  “Uh, no place permanent.  I’m kind of between apartments.  Rent is so high these days.”

She gave him a sideways glance.  “So, you’re homeless, in other words.”

“No!  I’m staying in a shelter uptown temporarily while I look for a new apartment.  It’s just hard to find anything.”  Howard explained that he had left New York soon after moving out of the squat and had been drifting since then, traveling all over the country—San Francisco, Portland, Denver, New Orleans—in the early years taking up with various counter-cultural groups, even signing on for a stint in a commune in Taos, and had only come back to New York in the past year.  His travels had earned him several brushes with the law, including a short term  in prison for writing bad checks, though he didn’t elaborate on that unfortunate incident as yet.  Over the years, he had been in and out of treatment programs for his various substance abuse problems, though he assured Martha that he had long since cleaned up his act.  “But I think I’m back in New York to stay,” he went on.  “I think I’ve always been a New Yorker at heart and maybe I never should have left.”  There were some bad memories connected with the city, of course, though two decades later, surely he was over them.  “I’d like to find a room in a transient hotel.  Or a squat—that would be ideal.”

Martha barely stifled a guffaw.  “No squats in the East Village anymore.  At least no squats you can get into.  Maybe a handful that have been legalized.  All the rest were cleared out years ago.”

Ed Hamilton, 2014

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Interview with Louisa Solano: Former owner of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop tells it all.

Louisa Solano

 Interview with Louisa Solano: Former owner of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop tells it all.

By Doug Holder

 **** This is an interview I conducted with Louisa Solano shortly after she sold the Grolier... It appeared in Circle Magazine.

The acclaimed poet Donald Hall said of The Grolier Poetry Bookshop: "It is the greatest poetry place in the universe." And this may not be hyperbole. Founded in 1927 by Gordon Cairnie, and Adrian Gambet, it was the first bookstore in the Cambridge area to sell James Joyce's Ulysses. In its salad days the likes of T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Moore, and countless other poets patronized this store. Louisa Solano, the current owner, has been connected with the store for over forty years, first as a worker, and later as an owner. Solano changed the original Grolier, to an all-poetry bookstore, probably the most prominent in the country and perhaps the world. Solano told an interviewer that the bookstore was much more than a seller of books. In its prime Solano said the place was "packed with people, reading books and discussing poetry." Due to escalating rents, the Internet, and the difficulty with competing chain bookstores, Solano has been forced to sell this haven for poets on Plympton St., in the heart of Harvard Square, Cambridge. I talked with Solano on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet/Writer To Writer.

Doug Holder: What was the straw that broke the camel's back that made you need to put the business up for sale?

Louisa Solano: I essentially have been supporting the store on my charge card for the past two or three years. I have no real money of my own. It came to the point when I had to pay, and I just couldn't. And also one year there was a very heavy theft in the store, and I couldn't recover from it.

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This store actually existed on mail-order business for many years. In 1998 the Internet started coming up, and gradually ate up my business. Poetry is the texture of life and language, and if you don't have it on an actual page in front of you, you are losing your language.

Doug Holder: In an interview with a group of Emerson College students you said of the original owner, Gordon Cairnie: "Gordon was famous for his postcards and correspondence with everybody. He never sold books, he never paid bills, and he just wrote postcards. And he was cantankerous. People who would come into the shop would leave insulted. How have you changed things?

Louisa Solano: I don't write postcards, I send emails. I do sell books. I try not to be cantankerous, but admittedly I have my moments.

I have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I was diagnosed in my 40's. I know people have accused me of looking through them or being a snob. Actually when I am doing this it may very be in the midst of a Petite Mal. People say that I sometimes yell at them or say some really horrible things, but quite frankly I have no memory of it most of the time. It's unfortunate when people have that experience of me, because since I am not aware of it I can't do anything about it. To apologize is to say I am responsible, but I am really not. People don't comprehend how this disease controls one's personality. Sometimes the way you speak comes out like Tourette's Syndrome.

 

Doug Holder: It doesn't seem that you had warm, fuzzy feelings for Gordon Cairnie.

Louisa Solano: I was often in there when I was 15 or 16 years old. He let me sit in the shop. And as a lot of the younger people came along, he did the same thing. We could project on him the "second father" and things like that. When I first came to the Grolier he was not cantankerous. I understand that he had an accident that changed his personality. Gordon's social life centered on Harvard international students and the B-School. It was a very sophisticated group that hung around the store. So the whole group that surrounded him was urbane and well educated. And you had the students from The Harvard Advocate. At this time there was also a great sense of warmth.

Doug Holder: Could Cairnie be called a snob?

Louisa Solano: Cairnie was very class conscious. Gordon definitely liked people who were upper class, had money, were beautiful. There was a sign on that door that read "No Law Books" "No Text Books". It was very confusing and ugly for the younger people and students who hung out there. When I took over the first thing I did was to take down the signs. I democratized it out of the white male poet syndrome and moved the store to more involvement with the community.

Doug Holder: How as it for a woman to run a bookstore, when it was a mostly male-dominated business?

Louisa Solano: I was chronically, acutely shy. I hardly ever opened my mouth. I never talked. I was the youngest person there usually.
I took over the store in Jan. 1974 after Cairnie died. It took me over 10 years of owning the store to get any kind of confidence or raise my voice. People were always saying to me: " Can you please speak louder, we can't understand you!"

Doug Holder: It is common knowledge that well-established, famous poets patronized your store. But how about the BEATS, or poets outside the mainstream?

Louisa Solano: Elsa Dorfman, the well-known Cambridge photographer, was one of the employees of the Patterson Society, which basically brought people like Robert Creeleyand Allen Ginsberg to Cambridge. Dorfman was and is a friend of mine, so she provided a Beat scene. Ginsberg happened to be her best friend.

Jack Kerouac read at Harvard toward the end of his life. Irish poet Desmond O'Grady shoehorned me into a meeting with him. We went to see him read. The audience was packed with students, waiting for Kerouac to behave like Kerouac. He was inebriated. Afterwards Desmond took Kerouac, myself, and a number of students, to visit (it seemed)
every single after hours bar in Cambridge. We eventually walked Kerouac back to the place he was staying. I remember, that same weekend, Sylvia Plath died. We were at Cronin's in Harvard Square and Desmond came in waving a newspaper and said: " She's dead, she's dead, we are now the only remaining poets." He grabbed Kerouac, and Kerouac backhanded Desmond, and said "Don't touch me!" Later, two young men came in and told Kerouac they had "gold", and he staggered down the street with them. That's the last we saw of him.

Doug Holder: What gave you the idea to change the Grolier from a regular to an all-poetry bookstore?

Louisa Solano: First of all it wasn't an all-poetry bookstore. It started out as a Fine Press bookstore. They had quite beautiful, limited, first edition books by Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Galsworthy, and others. When I went in there these books were covered with dust. A second printing of Edna St. Vincent Millay is not worth much to most people. Tastes change. He had a lot of poetry for that time, which made him a leading poetry bookseller on the East Coast. . Gordon changed it from a Fine Edition to a more literary bookstore.

When I took over all I inherited was a lot of bills, and unsellable books. I first tried to run it as a general bookstore. I realized if I were going to survive, I'd have to decide what this bookstore represents. After a month of sleepless nights, I decided to make it a poetry bookstore. I felt that was really needed. My decision to make it a poetry bookstore was
because of how undervalued poetry was. In this country the only way anything gets respected in this country is by money. Money defines anything that's worthwhile. If I could create a poetry bookstore that actually existed on commercial terms, people would say: "Look its got some worth". And it worked. It influenced the Academy of American Poet to start a National Poetry Month.

Doug Holder: Can you talk about some of the famous poets who visited the store over the years?

Louisa Solano: Robert Lowell visited the store twice. The first time I saw him I thought he was a bagman. Octavio Paz passed through here. I had a really wonderful conversation with him in the store. I couldn't believe I was talking psychology with OCATAVIO PAZ. I kept thinking I was going to freeze up, and will not be able to speak. When Seamus Heaney came to town, I noticed a couple with two kids in the Irish section. A little girl turned around and said, " My Daddy (Heaney) wrote this." I thought that was just wonderful. Jorie Graham comes through, as well as Peter Sacks. Donald Hall once said: "I want to be buried under the boards of this store." I said " Not on your life!" 

Doug Holder: You started a prize competition and a reading series. Was this an innovation for a bookstore?

Louisa Solano: Gail Mazur started her reading series, and I followed shortly after. She and I actually started the poetry prize together. Yes, it was an innovation. Most stores did not do that. I also started autograph parties. That was a lot of fun.

Doug Holder: What do you view as the role of the Small Press in the poetry world and literary world in general?

Louisa Solano: I happen to love the small press. To me the small press is the supporter of poetry. The small press brings back the adventure. When I first came to the Grolier there were all these pamphlets in the store. I was the first store to carry Language Magazine In fact; I was the first seller to carry many of the small press literary magazines.

Doug Holder: Poetry can bring out the best and the worst in people. You have had a host of difficult and even irate customers in your store over the years. Can you tell me about your experiences?

Louisa Solano: A student came in the store and started to yell at his professor, who happened to be there. He claimed the professor had "stolen his mind." I calmed him down, and took him to the outpatient clinic of a local hospital. That was an interesting event. Another time a young man came into the store half-naked, swinging a tire iron.
I had to take it away from him. One man who was totally obnoxious told me: "I have never been treated in such a manner before!' I said: "Wonderful, now you have a new experience!" I didn't want to disappoint the man, so I gave him a new experience.

Doug Holder: Can you name some of your favorite poetry journals?

Louisa Solano: Hanging Loose Tin House, to name a couple.

Doug Holder: Do you plan to write a book about your experiences?

Louisa Solano: Yes I do. People were suggesting I write a memoir of the store, but they were thinking of themselves as a central figure. I informed them the store would be the central figure. They didn't like that.

I have been around so long, and I know a lot of "stories" I feel I am going to need a good lawyer before I publish anything. The Houghton Library at Harvard will receive many of my papers.

Doug Holder: Are you a frustrated poet and or novelist?

Louisa Solano: I am a frustrated poet. About 7 years ago I was ready to shut the doors of the store, and do my own work. Then I figured what I was doing was more important than writing second-rate poetry. I very much want to write again when I leave the store.

The Hastings Room second annual Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading Aug 26, 2015

The Hastings Room

second annual

Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading

And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens… — “Song” S.H.


Wednesday 26 August 2015 at 7:00pm
First Church Congregationalist
11 Garden Street, near Harvard Square

Featuring
Greg Delanty and Tomas O’Leary


 

Greg Delanty ( Left)  Seamus Heaney ( Right)

Greg Delanty’s latest book of poems is Book Seventeen from LSU Pres. Other recent books are Loosestrife, Fomite Press; The Word Exchange, Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, WW Norton; and his Collected Poems 1986-2006, Oxford Poets—Carcanet Press. He is anthologized widely and has received many awards, most recently a Guggenheim for poetry.  He is Poet in Residence at Saint Michael’s College, Vermont. For further details view his website: gregdelanty.com

Tomas O'Leary is one of Cambridge’s most beloved local poets. His book In the Wellspring of the Ear, a "new and selected," is just out from Lynx House Press. His previous volumes of poetry include Fool at the Funeral, The Devil Take a Crooked House, and A Prayer for Everyone.

My sons, alive and well, have never met
the old man who was father to their old man,
the mythic fish who barely missed their net.
He’s theirs, though, surely as he’s mine.
    “My Father, My Sons” T.O.

Forty Years and Forty Nights: Tomas O’Leary’s In the Wellspring of the Ear: New and Selected Poems

Poet Tomas O'Leary

Forty Years and Forty Nights: Tomas O’Leary’s

In the Wellspring of the Ear: New and Selected Poems

article by Michael T. Steffen

One of the values of a collection of “new and selected poems,” in most cases featuring the new poems at the front of the book, involves this intrigue, tracing recurrent images and themes from the new poems back through the former ones. Defeat and (bad pun with a drum roll and crash of cymbals) the feet (prominent in the accents of an Irish lyricist), this haunts the muse of Tomas O’Leary from the outset of the new book, In the Wellspring of the Ear (Lynx House Press, 2015). For O’Leary characteristically adept at managing disappointments, this first poem “House on the High Road” surprises and nearly troubles the reader with tones of supplication, genuine remorse, and a plea of innocence on behalf of the offering of words which, it is suggested, have breathed on the first domino of a reaction that has gone awry (“the red treasure/Again on my hands…the dogs burn for my own blood”). Were it not for language, and the concentrated expressions of poetry, this grace of a medium for arbitration…

                                    my intention

            I swear was words only

            A reasoned package to deliver her…

The concentration delivering a phrase as fertile as “to deliver her” with its possibilities—of a physical birth, from a spiritual dilemma, or as the content of the parcel itself ?

The “her” evoked first in the book and juxtaposed with the poet’s trek of humility—

            High Lady low road

—remains otherwise unspecified, and harkens back to a poem from a previous collection, placed in section III of the new selected, “Love’s Virgin,” a tour-de-force of brevity and choice, making its margins and silence resonant. This earlier expression asserts the poet’s confidence with paradoxical terminology (magnified in “emerald of slime”) for the ambiguous experiences with inspiration, which James Joyce’s young Dedalus identified in the hot and cold faucets of the hotel room sink, James Merrill as the “up and down” journeys of the ski slopes. “Praise Death!” O’Leary exclaims, then more softly,

                        but leave a candle by for Love:

            Love’s Virgin, in her cove, keeps costly love,

            laying an altar cloth of emerald slime

            over the sacrificial face of time…

The determined trochaic meter and chiming couplets are the phonic inheritance, or Wellspring of the Ear, particularly of the folk of the isle of song and music.

As anybody who has had the pleasure of meeting and talking with him would attest, Tomas O’Leary’s manner and speech come across with enough Irish as to have you wonder that he was in fact raised in Somerville—by Irish immigrants. While sincere and gentle, O’Leary is full of character and wry humor tempering his playful, musical bearing, as one of the new poems describes his father:

            A genius of blather, a serious man to boot…

“My Father, My Sons” is a wonderful meditation on generations, preceding and ongoing, with a hint of the poet’s awareness of mortality in time that has passed, yet with the odd gift of memory that revives and retains his father’s speech:

            He died it seems almost forever ago,

            yet here he is to tell me this:

            “Sure eternity doesn’t take but a day,

            and day turns to day, and nothing ever missed…

and in the evocation of his sons and their inheritance of the genetic/cultural wellspring, with a marvelous fairy-tale-like image of the deflected passage from father to sons:

            My sons, alive and well, have never met

            the old man who was father to their old man,

            the mythic fish who barely missed their net.

            He’s theirs, though, surely as he’s mine.

Yeats is unmistakably present in O’Leary’s diction; though it is Yeats only in that Yeats widely embraced and appropriated the poetry of his nation’s speech, much as Whitman did for 19th century America. It is admirable and astonishing that O’Leary resists falling too mechanically into the stamped lyrical pattern very often, though the tetrameter (four-beat) line autographs his verse even in the poems lined in freer forms.

A good deal of the notes taken down for this article won’t have space here. The reader is left with much to discover, new and reorganized and presented anew. O’Leary is seasoned, wise with his allowance of scope about his subjects yet subtly poignant where he intends to be (notably in “Portrait of Alvarez” and “The Pleasures of Mourning,” a relentless go at the decorum and delicacies of a funeral wake). It will be one of the best collections from

a Cambridge poet in 2015.

Tomas O’Leary will appear with Greg Delanty to read at the second annual Seamus Heaney Tribute, part of the Hastings Room Reading Series, on Wednesday August 26, 2015

at 7:00 pm, First Church Congregationalist, 11 Garden Street near Harvard Square.

In the Wellspring of the Ear: New and Selected Poems/ISBN: 978-089924-143-2

by Tomas O’Leary / is on sale for $19.95 / Lynx House Press  Spokane, WA / www.lynxhousepress.org

Interview with Somerville poet Afaa Michael Weaver: A poet with a strong sense of responsibility.

Afaa Michael Weaver

 
Interview with Somerville poet Afaa Michael Weaver: A poet with a strong sense of responsibility.

By Doug Holder

Afaa Michael Weaver does not just write pretty poetry. He pens poetry that addresses things like the recent tragedies in Baltimore, South Carolina, Ferguson and elsewhere, where African Americans were killed—victims of hate crimes, and questionable actions of the police. His poetry does not consist of rants, and hopefully his art is a potent catalyst for people to think about injustice and change.

Weaver is a recent winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, and a Professor of English at Simmons College. I had the pleasure to talk to him on my Somerville Community Access TV show " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: You have written in response to the hate crimes, etc... against African Americans across the country. Recently The Somerville Times published a poem of yours that dealt with the killing in Baltimore. Does the artist have a responsibility in a time of social crisis?

Afaa Michael Weaver: I think he or she does. It is a complicated situation—as we saw in Ferguson, Baltimore, N.Y., etc...It is not always easy to write a poem in response to these things. But I felt compelled to write one in response to the situation in Charleston, where a young white man went into an African American church, and killed folks in a prayer meeting. We have to face facts about how influential we can be with our work-- how influential our poems can be. We have to ask: “ How can we move people?”I am always of the pinon that when I write a poem, I try to write the best poem that I can. I try not to write a poem that is political and that is a very difficult thing to do. It could turn into a rant. With the poems I wrote in response to the crisis, I tried to move people emotionally.

DH: You published a chapbook of poetry “ A Hard Summation” (Central Square Press) that covers African American history from the Middle Passage to the present day. How did this project come about?

AFW: About 3 years ago I was asked by friends in Wisconsin to write poems about African Americans. At the time I was finishing up a draft of a memoir—so I decided to work on a pocket-sized collection of poems about this subject. My friends in Wisconsin are conservative Catholic, Republicans. We are part of an international group of poets for peace. They are people that want to bring together different spiritual and ethnic communities for the common good. My friends didn't know much about African American history, so I wrote a series of 13 poems with the intent of educating and inspiring my friends. I wanted them to think about race and racism. I knew they would uncover things that they never heard of. I was afraid of how they would respond to the book—especially with regard to slavery.

Not many people know very much about slavery. Certain basic facts are not well known. There were two periods to slavery. There was the Atlantic Slave Trade that went right up until the 19^th century when it was outlawed. When the cotton industry boomed—the demand for labor was huge—so slave owners, etc...got involved in breeding. The African American population went from 800,000 to 4 million before and after the Civil War. Slave pens were common on the city streets. Slaves were considered to be animals. And part of the problem today is that people are tied to this perception—and it is ingrained in the language.

DH: How do you mean it is ingrained in the language?

AFW: I mean value designations that are placed on certain words—black visual coding. For instance-- Hollywood, for years, has not wanted to portray Africa Americans in romantic relationships because it was believed they didn't have a romantic life. Even African-American are guilty of decimating themselves with Gangster Rap and Rap music lyrics. These can be very destructive forces to African American—with its glorification, violence and drugs.

DH: You are working on a play titled “ Grit” right now. I know the playwright August Wilson was an influence on you—and he wrote a series of plays about Pittsburgh. You are a native son of Baltimore—is this play going to be part of a a series too?

AFW: I am not looking to write a series. But I am looking to write a lot of plays about Baltimore. I am also studying acting—to add to my skills as a playwright.

DH: What exactly is the play about?

AFW: I can only talk about the play, generally. It involves generational shifts in demographics in the city.

DH: You studied with the playwright Paula Vogel at Brown University, right?

AFW: After my first two professional play productions I basically concentrated on poetry. But I continued to write poems when I went to Brown. Paula Vogel encouraged me around playwrighting. Grit is in its second draft—it needs a third. I am going to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis to have it looked at by accomplished playwrights who act as advisers.

DH: What is the new generation of American poets emphasis on?

AFW: The younger poets are more concerned with craft and the application of theory. But it is hard to make a general statement.

Buell Hollister: A Novelist with a Head for Shrunken Heads

Buell Hollister: A Novelist with a Head for Shrunken Heads

 By Doug Holder

Buell Hollister has a normal sized head, but one of his main characters in his new novel “Leeram in Fordlandia” has a decidedly shrunken one. Hollister, formerly the head of the august St. Botolph Club in Boston, has written his first novel “Leeram in Fordlandia.” I spoke with Hollister on my Somerville Community Access TV show, “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: So how does a shrunken head by the name of Leeram come into play in your novel?

Buell Hollister: At the beginning of the book a shrunken head makes an appearance. Actually, this has some basis of fact in my own life. A dentist friend of mine once showed me a prized shrunken head in his possession, and then put it away. Over the years I had the head in the back of my mind. A couple of years ago I used the head as a starting point for a short story I wrote. The protagonist in my novel Gilbert Greenbush helps the widow of the dentist to clear out his possessions after his death. The head happened to be high on the list of things she wanted to get rid of. So Greenbush agreed to take it. And that’s where the story begins. Greenbush keeps it around his house, and he slowly gets used to it. He says to himself that it is a perfect roommate. It doesn’t drunk his liquor and it doesn’t need food. Soon it becomes apparent that the head has a personality—a wise guy, like a New York cabdriver. And this head turns out to be a catalyst for change. Greenbush was the type of guy who would have spent his life as a barista at some out-of-the-way coffee shop—if not for this shrunken head.

DH: Was he fashioned after you at one point in your life?

BH: Well…maybe for a short period of time. I was jolted out of that state of inertia. This character is someone with enormous potential but he needed a situation that would propel him. Leeram was his alter ego.

DH: Also the women in his life propelled him, right?

BH: Several did, Laura, who was gorgeous and younger and Suxie, whois an Amazon. I envisioned Suxie as being six feet five inches tall—a larger than life figure. She has a very commanding presence. People do what she tells them to do. He meets both of these women at an anti-fur protest, where the protesters are wearing, literally nothing. Lisa and Gilbert wind up as a couple and, Leeram and Suxie wind up as sort of a couple.

DH: They all wind up in Fordlandia in Brazil.

BH: Fordlandia is a real place, with a real history. Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company, wanted to have control over everything. They had their own steel mills, etc… but they didn’t have their own rubber production. So Ford decided to have a rubber plantation. He took the plans for a typical Midwestern town: the architecture, the bandstand, the church and transplanted it to the jungles in Brazil. It was very strange. He believed that he could do this better than the natives. It was a disaster; it never worked. He eventually gave Fordlandia back to Brazil. So this band of friends in the novel wanted to operate a self-sustaining community in this abandoned space.

DH: You are 76 and this is your first novel. What took you so long?

BH: I started to write short stories a few years ago. At first I couldn’t get published; later I got published in a number of literary magazines. Someone told me, “The way you learn to write a novel, is to write a novel.” So I did. I worked with a good editor. He helped me organize my work. And of course I wanted to publish my novel. Publishers were telling me that it was well written, but because it is so off the wall— they wouldn’t be able to sell it. I found Merrimack Media. Since I was 76 I didn’t want to wait for years to publish. Most publishers stop pushing a book after three months and it is put on the remainder list. But a Merrimack book remains on sale, there are no deadlines; it remains on Amazon. Now I am working on a sequel to the novel.

DH: You were president of the prominent St. Botolph Club in Boston—a big supporter of the arts.

BH: The St. Botolph Club is an old, venerable institution. There are many accomplished members. It is located in the Back Bay of Boston on Commonwealth Ave. Its mission centers on the arts. It celebrates visual arts, music, the written word, etc… Such writers as Saul Bellow, as well as musicians like Yo Yo Ma were members. There are also scientists who are members. I can think one of one retired MIT physics professor, who is now into sculpting. I was elected into the position. I had the time to do it, and I found it very rewarding.